Vance, like Trump, shares Trump’s semi-unlikely path to politics. Both come from elitist and privileged backgrounds, and both still posture as common men with deep, intimate connections to the working class. They also share remarkably fragile egos: Where Trump was allegedly motivated to run for president by President Obama’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner jokes mocking him in 2012, Vance allegedly decided to run for Senate after Hillbilly Elegy, based on his memoir, flopped on Rotten Tomatoes. In 2022, the Washington Post reported that, according to a friend of Vance’s who attended Yale Law School with him, negative reviews from “snobby critics” were the “last straw” for Vance, compelling him to get in the race.
And since getting into politics following the success of his memoir about life in Appalachia, Vance has been giving women, LGBTQ people, and other marginalized communities hell. In 2021, Vance disturbingly argued against rape and incest exceptions for abortion bans: “Two wrongs don’t make a right,” he said. Months later, he spewed the wildly racist conspiracy theory that Democratic donor George Soros would send private jets “to load up disproportionately Black women to get them to go have abortions in California.” He went on to say that he supported “some federal response to prevent it from happening,” implying support for federal laws to prohibit or police interstate abortion-related travel. Also in 2022, Vance advocated for nationwide abortion criminalization and expressed support for Sen. Lindsey Graham’s (R-S.C.) proposed national 15-week abortion ban.
Somehow, it gets worse: Vance is also on record basically opposing no-fault divorce in disturbing remarks from 2022, all but calling for women to be entrapped in abusive marriages. No-fault divorce allows people to obtain a divorce without requiring them to prove abuse, desertion, or other mistreatment, even as the legal system famously makes “proving” abuse difficult if not impossible for victims. Vance suggested even domestic violence victims should stay with their spouses for the good of their kids:
“This is one of the great tricks that I think the sexual revolution pulled on the American populace, which is the idea that like, ‘Well, OK, these marriages were fundamentally, you know, they were maybe even violent, but certainly they were unhappy.’ … Maybe it worked out for the moms and dads, though I’m skeptical, but it really didn’t work out for the kids of those marriages. And that’s what I think all of us should be honest about, is we’ve run this experiment [no-fault divorce] in real time. And what we have is a lot of very, very real family dysfunction that’s making our kids unhappy.”
Before selecting Vance, Trump reportedly considered Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL), another anti-abortion extremist whose dick size Trump unsubtly mocked throughout the 2016 campaign trail, and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burnum, who signed into law one of the most extreme abortion bans in the nation.
So, that’s just a quick, little snapshot of Vance, really. Vance is a bizarre choice given Trump has spent the last several months trying to distance himself from anti-abortion extremism via his “leave abortion up to the states” bullshit. In perhaps the clearest signal that he was actively campaigning for veep-nominee, earlier this month, Vance—who, again, has previously advocated against even bare minimum exceptions to abortion bans—said Trump’s state’s rights position made the former president a “pragmatic leader.” I think that pivot sums up what we can expect of this duo: Two dumb bitches telling each other “exactlyyyy,” or, perhaps more accurately, Vance kissing Trump’s ass ad infinitum.
